


Small Parts Isolated and Destroyed

by DevilDoll



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Apocalypse, Character Death, Community: cliche_bingo, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-12
Updated: 2011-08-12
Packaged: 2017-10-22 13:33:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/238577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DevilDoll/pseuds/DevilDoll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It took Rodney and Zelenka four days to write the program that turned the Atlantis star drive into a self-destruct mechanism." Another way things could have ended.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Small Parts Isolated and Destroyed

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the “apocafic” square on my cliché_bingo card. I started this story so long ago, the first version included Elizabeth. This is sort of a "what if?" scenario based on the Wraith getting the information in the Atlantis computers in "Allies."

**Then**

It took Rodney and Zelenka four days to write the program that turned the Atlantis star drive into a self-destruct mechanism. Rodney, with equal parts humor and horror, called it his Manhattan Project, and said almost nothing else about it. John mostly left him alone, but sometimes at night he would go down to the computer lab where McKay was crashed out on one of the padded benches, and sit on the floor with his back against Rodney’s bent knees.

John believed right up until the end that they wouldn’t need to do it, that someone would come up with a way to stop the Wraith in their tracks, and it was almost a surprise to realize they were really leaving, that he really had to pack his stuff and destroy his files and somehow keep everyone organized when all he wanted to do was scream at Rodney to _fix it_.

It didn’t seem real until he was standing on the gateroom floor with his pack, waiting for the last chevron to lock so they could go home to another losing battle--there was no way the Wraith wouldn't follow them.

Carter and John watched Rodney hit one final key on the rigged laptop, his hand steady but his shoulders hunched, and they went through the gate together, the last three out. General Landry was waiting for them on the other side, Dr. Jackson standing solemnly behind him. Rodney and Carter stopped to talk; John kept walking right out of the gateroom, and never looked back.

* * *

  
 **Now**

Rodney and John end up in a bunker in the middle of North Dakota, sleeping on cots, and eating food that looks (and tastes) like it’s been there since the Kennedy administration.

Rodney works on a bomb delivery system, basically sending nuclear weapons up on rockets, because the United States isn’t armed for a war that takes place that far above the Earth, and most of their weapons don’t have the range to do any good. It's a pointless task, and they both know it, but that's what the government wants, and Rodney feels better if he's working on something, and John goes where Rodney goes.

A sign-up sheet appears for kamikaze missions, and John puts his name on it, more for show than anything else—Rodney’s writing the lottery program that'll pick the pilots, and John knows that’s a guarantee his name will never turn up. He doesn’t even try to argue with him about it.

John spends two days in a simulator and the next six weeks making daily runs in the still-buggy H-9X, which hasn't been declassified yet and still pretty much sucks, grimly engaging in endless dogfights with darts, trying to hold them back, even though everyone knows it’s useless.

He gets shot down twice, both times ejects and is retrieved. Both times Rodney is mad at him for days.

* * *

  
 **Then**

Destroying Atlantis didn't slow the Wraith down--they already had everything that was in the computers anyway. But it kept the city out of Wraith hands, and that was some small comfort.

They had a few months where they could pretend everything was normal, that there was hope. That maybe the Wraith were too busy munching away on Pegasus residents to bother with Earth.

Then word came from deep space--the Wraith were on the way.

* * *

  
 **Now**

The last nuke is launched into space from the North Dakota bunker at 0900 on a Tuesday.

After that, John and Rodney are free to go—everyone is free to go. There are no more planes to fly, no more bombs to launch, and nothing to do but wait to get culled.

They load up a Humvee and leave, driving through the rusty gate, hanging open and unguarded, one last time. Rodney has a map and a destination in mind, and that's good enough for John. They've stuck together this long, no point in changing that now.

Rodney stares out the window, watching the non-descript landscape roll by, hands moving repetitively over the laptop resting on his knees; useless now, a security blanket.

* * *

  
 **Then**

Ronon came through the wormhole with them, claiming he had no home to go back to anyway, and he moved into Cheyenne Mountain with the rest of the Atlantis crew. After a couple months he started to supplement his wardrobe with Earth clothes, and John thought that of all the weird things he’d seen, Ronon wandering the halls of Stargate Command in a Punisher T-shirt was the weirdest.

John wasn’t sure Ronon’d made the right choice; with all the Wraith headed for Earth, Pegasus was the safest place to be. All the same, John was grateful to have him there.

Sometimes they would go get Rodney, make him take a break, and they'd hang out in John's room--four cement walls, nothing to look at but each other--and drink cheap beer. Rodney would read excerpts from Zelenka's emails; he was at Area 51 with Lorne and a lot of the other Atlantis people. Someone would always bring up Teyla, and they’d all reassure each other that she was fine, living happily ever after with Torran and Kanaan and the rest of the Athosians.

Right before Rodney and John went to North Dakota, Carter got dispatched to Antarctica, so John asked Ronon to go with her. He couldn't imagine being someplace where he could go all day and never see the face of another person who had been to Atlantis.

* * *

  
 **Now**

It’s mid-summer, and everything is green and gorgeous as they roll through the countryside, off-roading it when they need to get around stalled cars. They listen to music and audio books, and sometimes argue about stupid stuff, but the more they drive, the more often they just roll down the windows and let the sounds of the road wash over them.

It's amazing how much noise there _isn't_ now. The steady hum of electric gadgets and overhead power lines, the burble of engines, the shouts of people, radio and TV chatter, honking horns and delivery trucks. All gone, replaced by the less intrusive sounds of nature.

They drive during the day, mostly, siphoning gas when they have to with a little pump Rodney built, eating what they can scrounge when they get sick of MREs.

It’s been months since grocery stores were open regularly, and even longer since there’s been a steady supply of fresh vegetables and meat—people don’t have time to farm when they’re hiding from the cullings. But there’s still food to be found in warehouses and supermarkets, if you can find one that hasn’t been completely cleaned out, and if you’re careful of the dates.

They live mainly on canned and jarred food, stale crackers, Hostess treats, Cheetos. Rodney is in heaven.

* * *

  
 **Then**

The evacuations started eight months after Atlantis fell, groups of people sent through the gate to the Alpha Site, the order determined by a White House committee that got to decide who was important enough to live.

One month after that, the first hive ship appeared on the horizon. By the time there were three, the Wraith tried to take Cheyenne Mountain, and the gate was lost in a pile of rubble.

* * *

  
 **Now**

They go north and east, crossing into Canada without stopping--no one cares about the border anymore. Rodney knows where they’re going, has a plan; John’s just the pilot. Nothing’s changed there.

They sleep in the Humvee a lot, making a nest of sleeping bags and pillows in the back, and once John has a nightmare and sits up in the middle of the night, half awake, and hits his head on the roof. Rodney pulls him back down and pets his hair, feeling for a lump, and John falls asleep under Rodney’s drowsy fingers.

Most mornings, Rodney is touching John in some way when they wake up. A knee, a hand, an elbow. Rodney sometimes takes his left sock off during the night, without waking up, and when John asks him about it, he says he has no idea why he does it. John wonders how many people know that about Rodney. A dozen? Maybe not even that many?

One morning he wakes up to Rodney's bare toes pressed against the top of his foot, and that feels more intimate than anything, five little pink secrets.

* * *

  
 **Then**

The Wraith went for the countries with weaker air defenses first. The United Nations met and wrung their hands about it, and by the time they uselessly approved some funding for God only knew what, half the population of South America was gone.

An American general appeared on television and asked for calm, and conveniently didn’t mention that the President was several light years away, never to return.

* * *

  
 **Now**

Campgrounds with lake access are their favorite places to stop. Clothes and bodies are easily washed in the lake, and then dried next to a nice campfire. Rodney is a big fan of Spam on a stick, roasted over an open flame, and John’ll eat almost anything with enough ketchup on it.

Sitting on the tailgate of the Humvee, watching the sun go down over the water, it’s sometimes hard to believe that it isn’t just a run-of-the-mill camping trip, that they aren’t spending a few days roughing it in the woods before they go back to their lives. It feels almost normal.

John's spent a lot of time being a lot more miserable than this, actually.

* * *

  
 **Then**

For the first few months of the attack, they got semi-regular transmissions from the hive ships, demands for surrender, promises to leave peacefully if the government cooperated, the usual bullshit.

The last one included grainy video showing a room of slimy cocoons, a row of gray, slack faces, eyes dulled, but still recognizable. Carter. Zelenka. Lorne. Dozens more, familiar Atlantis faces. Not dead, not fed on. Waiting for something worse. There was no sign of Ronon, and John wasn't surprised. He'd never be taken alive again.

The queen’s smile was toothy and cold. “We’re only missing two.”

* * *

  
 **Now**

They fill up the truck and the spare gas cans whenever they can, and only run out of gas once, just a few miles short of a town that has a gas station, if the signs they've seen along the road are to be believed.

John decides he'll take the gas can and walk, and Rodney will stay with the Humvee. Rodney doesn't protest, but he doesn't look happy either.

"John," he says, hesitantly, as John's tucking a pistol into the back of his jeans, and it sounds strange to hear Rodney call him that, in that tone.

"What?"

Rodney lifts his hands in a helpless gesture. "Just…come back."

John grins at him, all for show. "I always do."

Not only is there a gas station, it's operating. The guy behind the counter wants fifty dollars for one gallon of gas, which is absurd, because there’s nothing to spend the money on anyway. When John politely points this out, a second man blocks the door, making sure John can see the baseball bat in his hands.

John shoots them both.

He doesn’t say anything when he gets back to the truck with the gas and a couple bags of chips, but Rodney’s more sensitive to John’s moods than anyone in history, so he talks incessantly and frets over nothing (“Is that a bee? I thought I saw a bee!”) until John opens the Doritos to distract him.

* * *

  
 **Then**

The U.S. put up a fight, but even with the Asgard technology it wasn’t much of one. New York went down first, millions of people gone in a little over a week, fled or scooped up by the beams, and the United States discovered that, contrary to what most New Yorkers believed, it could go on without New York City.

There was a break after that, over a year, and life went back to semi-normal; airlines flew, television stations resumed programming, kids went to school. A new American Idol winner was chosen, and baseball decided to go ahead with spring training.

The Wraith ships re-appeared, and L.A. fell, and after that, Chicago. Looting became widespread, which lead to curfews, which inevitably led to the National Guard trucks rolling into cities. The little towns, largely ignored by both Wraith and humans, did pretty well, self-sufficient and bent on survival. Most of them put up roadblocks to keep strangers out.

Once in a while a nutjob, or an organized militia of nutjobs, would hijack a defunct television station and spend a couple hours on rhapsodic blame-placing: the Jews, the gays, the Muslims, the atheists, the feminists. Everyone but good old straight, white Christians.

John thought that was pretty funny, but he didn’t bother to tell anyone that if they wanted to blame someone, he was the guy. They wouldn’t have believed him anyway.

* * *

  
 **Now**

The ski resort that is Rodney’s final destination is abandoned. They break into the restaurant down the road and help themselves to some non-perishables, and then visit the general store, which has been picked over but still offers some decent stuff, when your definition of decent has been shaped by years of military rations and scavenging.

It’s far enough out of the way, a tourist town with a small population, that no one has been here in months. They find an abandoned garden growing wild, filled with weeds, but it has tomatoes and cucumbers and about six thousand zucchini. They stuff themselves right there, grinning like maniacs, the vegetables sun-warmed and dusty in their hands.

In the corner they find a small pumpkin, still green. It won’t be orange for weeks. They leave it where it is.

The ski resort condos are nice, with kitchens and whirlpool bathtubs. A table near the door is stacked with resort brochures offering fun summer things like go-karts and bicycle trails and horseback riding. John throws them in the trash. Later, from the balcony, he sees one of the horses on a patch of grass down by the slimy, half-empty pool. It looks up at him, mouth working, and then goes back to eating.

Rodney drops his bag next to the bed in the master bedroom. John puts his duffle on the other side of the bed, even though there are two more perfectly serviceable bedrooms down the hall. Rodney doesn’t point that out.

They find the generator and get it running, and then they have electricity and hot water, which seems almost magical. Rodney estimates they can run the generator for about 48 hours, which is more than enough time.

For dinner, they make macaroni and cheese from a box, with powdered milk and no butter, and it’s delicious. They serve it with canned green beans and sliced cucumbers. Dessert is brownies, baked in the oven, hot and chocolaty, and Rodney eats half the pan.

Hot showers are more than a luxury, they’re merely a memory, and John makes the most of his, and then thinks about filling the bathtub for a soak, but decides that’s overkill. _There’s always tomorrow_ , he thinks, and his hands stutter to a stop as he lathers shaving cream on his face. He grips the razor tightly, willing his hands to be steady, and scrapes the stubble away.

Rodney is in the bedroom, sitting cross-legged on the king-size bed. He has his computer open, hands resting on the keys, but he’s staring at the screen, unseeing. He looks up when John pads in, and then looks carefully away as John puts his sidearm on the nightstand, checking to make sure the safety is on.

They’re dressed to match, in boxer shorts and T-shirts, though Rodney’s shirt is too big on him now, after too many months of short supplies. His hair is still damp from his shower, and he shaved, too.

John thinks: maybe…

And then tells himself they’ll slouch on the bed and watch a movie and it’ll be—

It won’t be what he wants. Not at all.

Wanting Rodney has been the easy thing to do for years, because it was safe; there were a hundred reasons why John couldn’t do anything about it. Here, now, on the edge of a dying world, there’s only reason that matters: Rodney’s never wanted him back.

John very suddenly decides that if there were ever a time to take a chance, to press his luck, it’s now. There’s nothing to lose, and he’s so full of fear and longing, and so exhausted, and he’s tired of feeling powerless to change any of it. If he could just have this one thing before--

He kneels on the bed and gently takes Rodney’s laptop from him, which doesn’t even earn him a token protest. He closes it, sets it on the bed between them, looks at Rodney, and waits.

Rodney picks up the laptop and puts it on the floor.

He watches with a mixture of nervousness and curiosity as John puts his hand on the back of his neck, but his eyes go wide as John leans in. He starts to draw back, not much, but a little, and John tightens his hold. “Let me,” he said, words barely a breath against Rodney’s lips, and Rodney closes his eyes and nods, the click of a swallow in his throat.

Rodney says, “I’ve never done this before.”

John wants to say, “I've loved you forever,” and, “I’d do anything for you.”

He says, “I know,” and, “I don’t care.”

The kiss is slow and gentle, and John keeps it going for a while, because he’s imagined it a thousand times, a thousand ways, and none of them were ever this good.

Rodney keeps his eyes closed as John kisses him, as John touches him, and John doesn’t care that Rodney is only doing this because it’s the end of the world. He’s wanted this for so long, it doesn’t matter anymore how he gets it.

Rodney murmurs in appreciation when John takes him in his mouth, head tipped back on the pillow, hands clenching the sheets. He takes things as slow as he can, pulling off when Rodney gets close to coming, nipping at the insides of his thighs, making long, tight pulls with his fist.

For a moment John wonders who Rodney's thinking of, who he pictures crouched between his legs, and then Rodney slides his fingers into his hair and says, “God, John,” and comes.

He crawls up Rodney's body, eager, even though he'd told himself he wasn't going to expect anything in return. But this moment is built on a million fantasies and eight years of wishful thinking, and he can't stop himself. _Rodney said his name._

John tips his head back and stares at the ceiling when he takes Rodney’s hand and puts it between his legs, moving it how he wants. It’s slow and sweet, and he wants to make it last, make it more than it is, but he wants to see Rodney’s hands touching him, at least once, so he finally looks down. Rodney is watching him, brow furrowed in concentration, eyes going from John’s face to John’s cock, checking his reaction.

Rodney wants to make it good for him. He wants to _see_. Something tears open in John's chest, hot and painful and true, and it’s all over.

* * *

  
 **Then**

"They won't take everyone," a general said, and after everything that had already happened, that was still a stunner, that the military’s back-up plan was that a couple hundred people would be left to carry on. "They leave enough people to re-populate the planet."

John knew that wasn't true. He'd seen Sateda.

* * *

  
 **Now**

He wakes up in the middle of the night with Rodney’s hands on his body, exploring him, touching, and then Rodney’s mouth, and he has to squeeze his eyes shut against everything that wells up in him, blocking out the thoughts of what they could have had. All the time they’ve lost, all the things they’ve missed; he puts it all aside and arches his back and lets himself say Rodney’s name over and over, until Rodney hushes him with a kiss.

They’re here now, and now is all they have.

* * *

  
 **Then**

They captured a dart that was barely dinged, and brought it to Rodney for retrofitting. When he got into the computer, he saw the Wraith had upgraded the beam technology, and it was now doing a DNA scan on everyone it picked up. Another day of tinkering revealed they were doing a cross-match with the DNA information taken from the Atlantis computers.

There was a file in the dart's computer, with pictures of John and Rodney.

"What does it say?" the general asked from his end of the conference table.

"A rough translation," Rodney said, and his voice barely shook at all, "would be 'reward.'"

* * *

  
 **Now**

A familiar prickle on his skin wakes John up just before dawn. When he goes to the window, the sky is just turning from pitch black to dark grey, and there’s a hum he feels in the middle of his chest as the darker mass of the hive ship glides over the horizon, lined with lights, darts dropping from it like falling stars.

He creeps back to the bed and curls behind Rodney, one hand sliding the gun under the pillow, the other skimming across Rodney’s warm stomach.

“What?” Rodney says, the word slurred with drowsiness. His fingers twine with John’s, thumb stroking lazily over a knuckle.

“Nothing.” John presses his mouth to the curve of Rodney’s ear, so delicate and vulnerable it hurts him to think about it. The click of the safety is lost in the rustle of sheets. “Go back to sleep.”

 **The End**


End file.
